When natural disaster strikes, it can be an arduous process to rebuild the affected region, and the financial impact can be immense. Policymakers need to assess the role that (re)insurers can play to ensure a sensible balance between public and private liability

Rating agencies have been battered by the media, but this is because people don’t understand how they work. Instead, they need to look more closely at the agencies’ rating methodology and why they are trusted by banks, brokers and investment houses

Trust, flexibility, security of capital and acute awareness that begins at the underwriting stage are all key to confidence in the relationship between cedants and reinsurers. Global Reinsurance joined players from both perspectives to share insights at a roundtable discussion

With a soft market seeming inevitable, businesses will have to rely for survival on good practice built since the chaos of the late 1990s. But both brokers and underwriters will also need to adopt unprecedented levels of care and caution

When volcanic ash halted air traffic, Seymour Matthews saw first-hand the devastation to Kenya’s export industry. Poorer countries need third-party contingency cover for such disasters, and reinsurers can and must work with governments to provide it

The world’s leaders were in Copenhagen to discuss climate change and, potentially, set new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We asked four leading firms for their hopes for the UN summit, and to spell out how they can contribute to the battle against carbon